The main goal of the project is to produce the first map of the Perseus spiral arm in our outer Galaxy as would be seen by an external observer at fixed spatial resolution. The Perseus arm extends over one third of the Milky Way’s observed span and covers different environmental conditions. 12CO data of the spiral arm are convolved to the same spatial resolution and regridded onto maps of constant linear scale.
A fundamental benchmark sample of GMCs is extracted from these Perseus spiral arm maps using a cloud-finding algorithm to determine their physical conditions and for comparison with GMCs in the inner Galaxy. This allows us to study the impact of different kinds of environments.
The first common resolution map of the Perseus arm is reprojected to any desired spatial resolution, to match observations of nearby galaxies and to provide a tool for comparison with extragalactic surveys.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 796461.